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Mobile Junction: January 14, 2009

• Once or twice a week, the screeching sound of brake pads locking rotors, metal hitting metal and glass splattering off the asphalt like rain would alert James Smalley to another accident.
“I can’t count the number of accidents I have seen out there,” he said.
As the manager of a store in the Peach Tree Shopping Center, on the southeast corner of Interstate 70 Business Loop and F Road in Clifton, he sees the traffic daily. He’s seen a vast improvement since a traffic light was installed at the shopping center’s Taco Bell entrance, by the Colorado Department of Transportation, a month back.
“It has helped out a lot on safety,” Smalley said.

Beetles grown in Palisadeto attack tamarisk elsewhere

• Without hesitation, Terri Locke reached for a stalk of beetle-covered tamarisk. Soon her hand, wrist and forearm were alive with the creepy-crawlers.
“They never talk back to me, they never have bad moods and they are appreciative when you feed them,” said Locke, a biological control specialist.
As a 20-year veteran of the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s Insectary Facility, 750 37 8/10 Road in Palisade, she’s gotten to know these beetles rather intimately.
She keeps five strains of tamarisk-eating beetles alive by feeding them tamarisk grown in the insectary’s greenhouse and importing various strains of tamarisk from around the world.
But these beetles, that she cares for so lovingly, may never see the wild. And the ones that do will be exported out of Colorado before release.
“Permits to release these creatures are really hard to come by,” she said.

Gold’s Gym planning expansion of Clifton facilities

• It opened Dec. 1. It already has close to 700 members. It is building another facility.
“It” is Gold’s Gym in the Peach Tree Shopping Center in Clifton.
“This is kind of temporary,” said Bobby Brannon, fitness counselor at the Gold’s Gym, Clifton. “Eventually we are going to be at the Albertsons building.”
A couple hundred feet to the west of the existing gym is the shell of a former grocery store. A tractor-trailer being filled with demolition materials from inside the store extends out the building’s north doors. Peering inside, past the dust-covered windows, one can see all manner of construction machinery.
Brannon said by this summer, the old grocery will be transformed into the new Gold’s Gym with basketball and racquetball courts, steam rooms, saunas and a “cardio-cinema room.”